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A political economy of positions in climate change negotiations: Economic, structural, domestic, and strategic explanations

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Abstract

After the disappointing outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit, it still remains to be explained why the participating states chose irreconcilable negotiation positions that reflected very diverse domestic interests in spite of a publicly displayed desire for cooperation. While environmental studies have intensely investigated national climate policies and their determinants over the last few decades, little attention has been paid to the bargaining positions the same governments assume in climate negotiations. We argue that their bargaining positions reflect structural, economic, and domestic factors, but less so strategic factors. A country’s vulnerability to climate change, its power and its democratic status are among the best predictors of its choice of negotiation position; its international interconnectedness, on the other hand, does not seem to have an influence. By comparing two negotiation issues – reducing emissions and financing climate mitigation – we can show that democracies choose very different negotiation positions, depending on the issue. When it comes to compensation mechanisms, serious climate reduction measures democracies do not commit to substantial emission reduction targets due to pressure from industry at home. They are, however, more prepared than other states to pay for projects that help to reduce emissions in the sense of a compensation mechanism. By understanding the choice of negotiation positions we can thus explain why the more or less cooperative bargaining positions adopted by states led to a breakdown of the Copenhagen negotiations. We investigated this question using a novel dataset on the UNFCCC negotiations, in which the positions of all participating governments were collected by hand-coding protocols from the negotiations as well as expert interviews with negotiators.

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Notes

  1. We use the terms ‘bargaining’ and ‘negotiating’ interchangeably.

  2. The argument that the median voter prefers more cooperation (and thus environmental protection) can be disputed, as the strategy of free riding on the effort of others, which is often ascribed to states with regards to climate change, can equally well be applied to the individual level. In other words, when given the choice of paying for emitting greenhouse gases or not, rational choice theory suggests that a majority of people would opt for the latter option. However, people do not usually have the choice of whether to pay tax or not, and a single person’s influence on the implementation of new laws is usually quite limited. Brennan (2009) shows that in such circumstances the payoffs for individuals are changed such that “doing the right thing” (i.e., supporting a policy that one would reject if deciding alone) generates a higher reward than outright rejection of the policy. Over the whole population, public opinion might thus be in favor of a policy which would likely be rejected by most individuals were they to decide alone.

  3. We coded multiple issues and also included a measure of issue salience in the coding scheme. The stated inter-coder reliability concerns the entire coding scheme. The coding of mitigation targets resulted in the biggest consensus among coders, since this simply involves registering numbers. However, we do not provide numbers for single issues since we did not find enough entries on the 50 pages used to refine the coding scheme to conduct reliability tests for single issues.

  4. The six issues are Annex 1 mitigation Targets (by 2020), Annex 1 Mitigation Targets (by 2050), Non-Annex 1 Mitigation Targets, Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), Adaptation Funds, and Mitigation Funds. We only use two of these issues for two reasons. First, a factor analysis confirms that underlying our six issues are two main factors. The two issues concerning mitigation targets load heavily on the first factor, while the two finance variables (Mitigation and Adaptation Funds) have high loadings for the second factor. Since Adaptation Finance also has a relatively high loading for the first factor, we chose Mitigation Funds as the second dependent variable. The second reason is that the factor analysis confirms what we learned about the negotiations as official observers during various negotiations rounds. Short-term mitigation targets and finance for mitigation were strongly contested and, in our opinion, were two of the most crucial issues before and during the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. The factor analysis can be found in Table A1 in the web appendix for this paper, available on this journal’s webpage.

  5. More precisely, the following coding rules were applied: only voluntary contributions (coded as 0); bi- or multilaterally agreed contributions, plus voluntary contributions (33); bi- or multilaterally agreed contributions plus negotiated contributions coming from market mechanisms, plus voluntary contributions (66); 0.1 to 0.5% of GDP as mandatory contributions (85); 0.5 to <1% of GDP (90); 1 to <2% of GDP (95); >2% of GDP (100).

  6. As an alternative measure, we also use the Polity IV index for democratic status. Similarly, as an alternative measure for IO membership we used membership in environmental organizations only. See web appendix to this paper (part b and c), available on this journal’s webpage.

  7. We tried alternative operationalizations of public opinion influence, such as a direct measure derived from our interviews or a measure for post-materialism derived from the World Values Survey, but these caused the loss of two thirds of our cases. We therefore decided to use the SO2 per capita measure despite its roughness.

  8. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III calls for greenhouse gas concentration levels in the atmosphere below 450 ppm (CO2-eq.). However, even this scenario has an 80 % chance of increasing global temperatures by more than 2 °C (the target mentioned in the Copenhagen Accord). Höhne (2010) analyzed the Annex 1 emission pledges after Copenhagen (which are closely connected to their positions) and concludes that these would stack up to global warming of 3.5 °C, while Rogelj et al. (2010) conclude that what Annex 1 countries are offering is in no way sufficient to combat global warming.

  9. In the web appendix (part e), available on this journal’s webpage, we test and discuss the connection between the two issues empirically. We indeed find the expected link that less cooperative positions regarding reduction targets lead to more cooperative positions on mitigation finance. The same is not true the other way around, mitigation finance positions have no effect on countries’ reduction target positions.

  10. Being an Annex 1 country in almost all cases also means that they are also highly democratic (the exception is Russia). Hence, the effect of democracy is somewhat unclear: does it encourage cooperativeness, as we claim, or is it mostly a driver for the selection into the Annex 1 group? If so, then this might drive the significance levels of the Annex 1 dummy, at the cost of significance of the democracy variable (particularly for the reduction target models). To test whether this problem affects our results, we used selection models and found that the results for democracy are rather stable. The same is also true for most other variables in the model. For a discussion of the selection models, see the web appendix (part f) on this journal’s webpage.

  11. Again, see the web appendix (part e) for a more detailed discussion on how this compensation mechanism works. For further robustness checks of the models used in this paper, please also refer to the web appendix (part g) on this journal’s webpage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Haldeneggsteig 4, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Stefanie Bailer

  2. University of Bamberg, Feldkirchenstrasse 21, 96045, Bamberg, Germany

    Florian Weiler

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  1. Stefanie Bailer
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  2. Florian Weiler
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Correspondence to Stefanie Bailer.

Additional information

We thank discussants at the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop “Preferences in the European Union and Beyond”, St. Gallen, 12–16 April 2011, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, 2–5 September 2010, as well as Katja Michaelowa, Axel Michaelowa, Paula Castro, Lena Hörnlein, Vally Koubi, Thomas Bernauer and Tobias Böhmelt. This paper was written in the framework of the research project “Negotiating Climate Change” funded by the Swiss Network of International Studies.

Both authors contributed equally to this work.

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Bailer, S., Weiler, F. A political economy of positions in climate change negotiations: Economic, structural, domestic, and strategic explanations. Rev Int Organ 10, 43–66 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9198-0

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